Page - 28 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

28 Sektion I: Themen und Medien der Repräsentation of small paintings like these for court use, and many found their way onto snuffbo- xes. Tabatières were favorite parting gifts for visitors to the Habsburg court, often presented as personal mementos of the imperial family after diplomatic encounters.14 In that respect, this object reveals the overlapping trajectories of the familial and the political that combine in so much Habsburg-Lorraine art. In understanding this object’s historical significance, the traditional methodolo- gies of art history will only take us so far. We might wish firstly to situate it in the sociohistorical contexts of gift exchange at the imperial court. Here we must rely on that uniquely valuable primary source, the minutely detailed, multivolume diary of the court’s high chancellor, Johann Joseph Khevenhüller-Metsch. His text is filled with references to art, and he describes the presenting of snuffboxes with particular detail. A selection from one brief period of just over a month illustrates how snuff- boxes functioned within court ceremonial. On 23 May 1764, Khevenhüller writes that the Emperor and Empress received the Vicomte de Choiseul formally at a din- ner for the court’s highest nobles at Schönbrunn and afterwards presented him with a “magnificent, very expensive snuffbox garnished with diamonds and including the Empress’s portrait.”15 A few weeks later, on 1 July 1764, the court received the Span- ish Duke of Ossuna for a final audience, during which he received a “magnificent” portrait of the Empress and from Archduke Leopold a golden snuffbox containing his portrait.16 These are not isolated references; Khevenhüller is filled with similar ones. But the Kaunitz Prunktabatière, it turns out, was not a typical diplomatic gift and therefore not presented to its intended recipient in the manner Khevenhüller describes. Here, then, his written record is of little help. Even if we were to find somewhere a long-buried reference to its initial gifting, that reference would not necessarily explain why this object looks as it does, or better said, the implications of constructing an object in this way materially. To understand those implications, we must remember that this object is not simply a visual construction and is therefore fundamentally unlike a picture that hangs on a wall. It is what the British art histor- ian Marcia Pointon has designated a ‘portrait object’: an object that is partly represen- tational and partly material.17 It is at once a visual and a tactile artistic construction, or to use the terminology of Alois Riegl, it combines both optic and haptic. Let us look more closely at it. The snuffbox’s portraits form its major elements, with representations of all Maria Theresa’s living children. One first notices that each family member appears individually. Individual likenesses stress the proliferation of Habsburg presence in Europe – their sheer number – in a way that makes the Habs- burg wish to repopulate the European nobility through strategic marriage and abun- dant childbirth apparent. The object can therefore be said to embody the Habsburg ideologies of proliferation and fecundity, highlighting Maria Theresa’s specific role as